The Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association (ZHDA) says the Health Services Board (HSB) has been “criminally” deducting its members’ call allowances and using them to pay their own staff. Below is their appeal to the government:

“The Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association would like to expose the unilateral and criminal slashing of our members’ well deserved on call allowances that were awarded to us in April 2018. According to the Collective Bargaining Agreement 2 (CBA 2) of March 30th 2018, the government agreed to give us a slight raise in on call allowances, and this was paid in April.

However to our dismay, the Health Services Board (HSB) has unilaterally imposed a slash on these, thereby violating that agreement. This is a direct effort meant to sabotage health care and criminally award themselves a new allowance, known as SPECIAL MEDICAL ALLOWANCE.

This allowance has been put at par with our on call allowance and is being awarded to non-clinical staff in the HSB secretariat, who have office day jobs and work eight (8) hours a day. The funds to pay this allowance have been deducted from doctors, nurses and other clinical staff nationwide. Morever, this special medical allowance is being deemed to be medical, yet there are no medical qualifications required for one to be in the HSB secretariat. There is complete disregard of the clinical staff who directly handle patients and their surroundings, i.e doctors, nurses etc.

We call upon the Ministry of Health and Child Care, Ministry of Finance and Economic Development and other responsible authorities to scrutinize this act and respond accordingly. HSB has oppressed our members for too long and this time we say NO, WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH. 
MAY THE GOVERNMENT ACT SWIFTLY IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN INDUSTRIAL HARMONY. 
In the meantime, we continue discharging our services to our valued patients

ZHDA INFORMATION DESK”